Woodstock and Warrior Potatoes

Two of the advertising inserts in yesterday's Sunday newspaper had some entertaining stuff.

The insert for the suburban big box store whose name is often pronounced with a French accent had a two-page spread for "Woodstock Exclusives" to "celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival ...." You, too, can now have the Woodstock logo (dove on guitar fret, with one human hand holding down some of the strings) on paper plates or napkins! Or a reversible picnic blanket, solid orange on one side, with a (non-psychedelic) repeating pattern of "3 days of peace and music" on the other side.

The "3 days" slogan is also on plastic tumblers and on some tees. However, in the upper left corner of the two-page spread is a bumper-sticker shaped box, with "Woodstock" and the trademarked logo on one line, followed by "Forty years of peace, love and music" on the second line. Presumably love was left out of the items for sale by the big-box store because someone recognized that in the Woodstock context love was the S in S, D, and R&R description of the sixties (here tactfully not spelled out.)

Meanwhile, in another ad from a big-box store that has a letter of the alphabet preceding "Mart"as its name, there was a two-page spread for Transformers tie-ins from the movie. All in dark colors, except, down in the lower right corner, there was a bright yellow figure, described as "Mr. Potato Head Bumble Spud Taterobt. No ordinary fries, these are POTATOES IN DISGUISE! tm." Only $8.99: I found this so funny I might go buy one. To heck with peace and love.

Wink wink, nudge nudge

A billboard on the SF Muni platform at the Embarcadero Station shows that one company knows some slang -- or has an ad agency that does. The ad is for combined cable and phone services, and says, as far as I can remember: "Check out our package. You know you want to," followed by something like "Proud to celebrate SF Pride." That's the clue as to the slang.

It resonates nicely with the one two billboards away touting solar panels, with something along the lines of "Stimulus packages on the roof." That wasn't intended to be slang, but now seems to be.

Sometime it pays to be semi-awake during ones commute.